With a vast and growing population of people going online to shop, read news, search for information, seek entertainment, check weather and traffic, transact business, and so forth, there are myriad opportunities and contexts within which providers can interact with people in meaningful ways. Each time a person visits a website and views a page provides another opportunity to offer information tailored to that person, such as targeted advertisements, specialty articles, recommendations, and so forth. However, there is limited viewable space on a page and the amount of space varies depending upon the computing device used to render the page. Getting the right information to the right audience in a timely manner presents an ongoing challenge.
There have been various approaches to selecting what content gets put on a page and where that content is placed. Manual placement is widely used, where site operators decide which items are placed in prescribed locations on the page. Ranking schemes have also been used to order lists of items or rank search results, so that items of more relevance are prioritized over items of less relevance. In the context of online advertising, auction algorithms have also been employed to allow advertisers to compete for locations on the page.
Once selection and placement decisions are made and the content is served, it is difficult to know whether the content presented was optimal for any given user. For instance, suppose a site operator is building a page that contains an article on mountaineering and the page has slots available for advertisements. Common sense might dictate that the most appropriate advertisements would pertain to mountaineering, such as climbing gear or vacation packages to destination mountain resorts. However, if the content appeals more generally to young adults interested in outdoor activities, many of whom are parents of small children, perhaps an advertisement for children's clothing would be more successful in driving sale activity than the vacation advertisement.
Accordingly, there remains a need for improved selection and placement of content that is tailored to individual users.